UC Irvine

Technology is closing the distance between users on the one hand and between users and businesses on the other. Social technologies help create social proximity and promote the sharing of information, while location-enabled services enable spatial proximity and allow businesses to leverage the precise dynamic location of users in their marketing strategies. This dissertation examines the impact of social and location-based technologies on consumer choice in the context of the music industry and mobile analytics. In the music context, I examines the interactions between social proximity and consumer choice in the context of an online music community. In the area of mobile analytics, my research studies how location-based services (i.e., local search and geo-fence marketing) impact consumer choice and transform business strategies. My research design applies a variety of empirical methods to highly granular data. My analysis finds robust evidence of the impact of social and spatial proximity on consumer choice. I discuss implications for design and marketing strategies for online communities, mobile local search engine and geo-fence advertising, such as the contexts studied in this dissertation.